AMD Trinity Previews Roundup

Less than two days ago, Benchmark Reviews received the latest and greatest APUs from AMD; the A10-5800K and the A8-5600K. They don't launch in the retail market for a couple of weeks, but we are bringing you the low down in a special preview of the newest Accelerated Processing Units about to become available. The Second Generation APUs follow along the same lines as last year's APU releases by AMD with some notable upgrades in both CPU and GPU performance. The new "Trinity" series of APUs also comes with a new chipset and socket that are surprisingly not backwards compatible with the first generation "Llano" series of APUs.

Today we've got an early look at what AMD's latest and greatest desktop products, namely AMD FM2 APUs. Soon to launch into the retail space, we take an early look at what's coming from AMD, in the form of the AMD A10-5800K processor.

We're taking a somewhat different two-tiered approach with our coverage of AMD's new Trinity-based APUs for desktop systems today. AMD is lifting the veil on their new product line-up, in addition to graphics performance and power consumption, but we can't quite give you the full monty just yet, due to a new multi-tiered launch approach AMD decided to take with these products. If you want to see how well AMD's latest desktop APUs overclock, how their processor cores perform, or how they're priced, you're going to have to stop by in a few more days. For now though, we've got graphics performance and power consumption characteristics to talk about and have some rather interesting side-by-side comparisons in store as well.

Although they're based on the same piece of silicon, Trinity-based APUs for desktop systems have much more power and thermal headroom to play with versus their notebook-bound cousins. As such, the chips are clocked much higher, in regard to both their CPU and GPU cores. In fact, one of the chips we'll be showing you here today, the A10-5800K, can Turbo all the way up to 4.2GHz.

Trinity is based on the updated Piledriver architecture, which is an update to Bulldozer. Piledriver improves upon IPC by a small amount over Bulldozer, but the biggest impact is that of power consumption and higher clockspeeds. It was pretty well known that Bulldozer did not hit the performance expectations of both AMD and consumers. Part of this was due to the design pulling more power at the target clockspeeds than was expected. To remedy this, AMD lowered clockspeeds. Piledriver fixes most of those power issues, as well as sprinkles some extra efficiency into the design, so that clockspeeds can scale to speeds that will make these products more competitive with current Intel offerings.

AMD is allowing us to post a preview article up on the 2nd generation AMD A-Series APU that was formerly codenamed "Trinity". AMD says this new APU offers improvements across the board when compared to the previous generation thanks to the new "Piledriver" CPU cores and AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series graphics technology. Read on to see how this new APU performs when we put it to the test in some game titles!

Today AMD are allowing previews of their latest APU range based around gaming performance. So we have taken the top model, the A10-5800K, combined it with the ASUS F2A85-V Pro and some high spec components before throwing the system at a selection of the latest games. How does the new platform deal with Borderlands 2, F1 2012 and more? Read on to find out.

Think you're pretty snazzy because your integrated graphics core plays mainstream games at 1280x720? We're on to bigger and better things, like modern titles at 1920x1080. Can AMD's Trinity architecture push high-enough frame rates to make this possible?

After years of waiting, AMD finally unveiled its Llano APU platform fifteen months ago. The APU promise was a new world where CPUs and GPUs would live in harmony on a single, monolithic die. Delivering the best of two very different computing architectures would hopefully pave the way for a completely new class of applications. That future is still distant, but today we're at least at the point where you can pretty much take for granted that if you buy a modern CPU it's going to ship with a GPU attached to it. Four months ago AMD took the wraps off of its new Trinity APU: a 32nm SoC with up to four Piledriver cores and a Cayman based GPU. Given AMD's new mobile-first focus, Trinity launched as a notebook platform. The desktop PC market is far from dead, just deprioritized. Today we have the first half of the Trinity desktop launch. Widespread APU availability won't be until next month, but AMD gave us the green light to begin sharing some details including GPU performance starting today. Read on for part 1 of our desktrop Trinity review!

Finally, the desktop Trinity is almost here. We got a preview of the integrated GPU gaming performance of the A10-5800K and A8-5600K APU. More detail on the CPU performance and full detail of the platform, architecture, overclocking, and benchmarks coming real soon.

A Preview of AMDs A8 A10 APUs 
When we saw AMDs Trinity, we were quite impressed with what the chipmaker did with the CPU section.